The Anchor of Reality

“Reality, what a concept” as Robin Williams so famously quipped, but indeed the term itself would infer a quality of immutability, a constant which would always be exerting a gravitational pull on us, so that no matter how far astray we allowed our minds to travel, we could always have a psychological home to which we could return when we grew weary of the world of thought and experimentation. But with belief systems so disparate, how can the Christian and the Jew or the agnostic, the fundamentalist and the scientist all agree on what reality is? Does it exist or is it in fact as Robin Williams eluded, just another concept? Is everything a matter of faith or belief and if so, isn’t everything relegated to interpretation, an amorphous cloud of deception, leading us further away from any sense of connectedness to each other or the universe?

With the following, I hope to help you answer these questions for yourself, because adopting the assertions of any self-proclaimed prophet robs each of us of the opportunity to have our own epiphanies, to discover truths for ourselves in an empirical way that goes beyond faith and belief, but instead becomes for us, a tangible foundation upon which to build the complex and at times unwieldy structures of our lives.

So with that said, now collect yourself, stop, feel your feet on the floor, your butt in the chair and listen to the sounds around you, what are you hearing? Are these sounds real or imagined? Now, go deeper, become aware of your breath, notice how the expanding of your lungs happens without thought, in fact, it is only when I draw your attention to it that you again become aware of it. Can you feel your heart beating inside of you? Is this not an example of a reality or an imagined concept? In fact, there are many such miracles of reality happening inside of us right at this minute. Perhaps that is plenty for you to digest for now, as you go through your day, draw your awareness inside of you to the fantastic phenomenon of reality that sustain your life. This is an example of the macro-attitude, which was discussed in the last installment. When you become more invested in your senses, more aware of the constants happening inside and all around you every second of your life, you realize that there is an anchor of reality upon which we can all rely when the storms of adversity rain down upon us. Later, perhaps today, tomorrow or this week, get out in Nature, look around you with the eye of a scientist and discover for yourself other realities that have perpetuated since the beginning of time. These realities do not exist on some remote plain of cosmology, but are part a parcel of the very forces that sustain you in this moment. Are the tide and the wind, the rain and the sun not real? Indeed they are the most obvious examples of the incredible truth of our existence, as we are quite literally the offspring of the sun, benefactors of the rain, we share a mineral kinship with our earth’s crust and our hearts, like the tides do the weather, sustain us, regenerate us and bind us the truth that our spirits and bodies do have a home, even if we drift off into the imagined world of our thoughts, we are always tethered to the umbilical cord of life, and that is a reality that no one can deny.